White Lotus

by John Hersey

  Changing gave me an opportunity to fumble in the crate. My coppers were gone. I said, casually, “I’m pushed over on my back. This is the first time you’ve asked to take me out since—ayah, I can’t remember.”

  “Hai,” Rock said, “you’re the big rice bowl around here. It was just an idea.”

  “You mean,” I said, coming to what appeared to be a full stop in my changing, “the silk filature is taking us out to eat? I thought you were inviting me.”

  “It was just an idea. If you don’t like it we can stay here. I’ve eaten plenty of white cabbage in my time, and I can eat some more. It’s nothing to me.”

  “I misunderstood you,” I said. “I thought we were going to eat an inch off those sleeves you’re saving for.” But by this time I had solidly intuited that my money had already been spent, and that Rock’s sleeve money was gone, too. Was he gambling? At this moment he was not in a position to decide what we would do, and I was, and I could not resist enjoying my having undone his male control. Thus, with the power of a little money, I would manage him, subtly if possible, bluntly if not, and I would insulate him from becoming a ruffian, a jail louse, a mass of bruises. I resumed changing, and said, “I’ll gladly pay. My mouth’s watering, Old Rock.”

  “If you want to go, it’s all right with me,” Rock said, as if he were now being somewhat forced to go.

  So out we went, and I paid. And before the evening was over I wanted Rock to make love to me, and here was where I began to feel as if my purse strings were tied around my gullet, choking me. If I wanted Rock, all of Rock, on our bed mat, I would have to accept him on his terms: I could not have command there. When he did take me, I still felt, at the end, a gnawing need, a yearning; it seemed to me that his side of our love-making had been perfunctory. My yearning cooled into suspicion. Had he, during recent days, spent his coppers on vixens? Or as “gifts” to easy-timers? Moth? Did Rock stay with me only for the money I brought home?

  “Ai, Rock,” I said, “I feel as if you’d been making love to a reeling basin. Don’t you want me?”

  But Rock seemed lazy and cheerful. He slapped his bare belly. “Those sweet-sour pork hocks were good.”

  Dream Court

  One dawn at the filature Harlot invited me to a meeting, three evenings away, of her hall. The Pavilion of Phoenixes, she said, had managed to freeze out the girl everyone disliked, Wood Mist, and she, Harlot, had told the members about me, and they were eager to meet me. I dreaded an inspection, but I found that I hungered for the respectability, the safety, the exclusiveness, the being an insider, that one of these small clubs could offer—especially a hall with several mixie members.

  Before the whistles, on the morning of the meeting, I spotted Harlot from a distance, and I saw that she was not in her drab everyday tunic and trousers but was dressed in a clean blue gown. That evening after work I rushed home to our puzzle box and went straight to Moth’s compartment and with tears of embarrassment in my eyes begged her to lend me her best gown, which was green—a glazed cotton. Moth’s two tigers were not at home.

  “Ai,” Moth said, “are you going out with the owner of your filature?”

  Before Moth I was ashamed of the idea of joining a hall, and I pleaded with her not to ask any questions. This made her certain that I was involved with a man.

  She paid me off for being glad to let her think this, by frightening me a little. “So Rock will be free tonight!” she said, rubbing her hands together.

  I had not even told Rock about the meeting. He had long since stopped accounting to me for his absences; why should I tell him my plans?

  “Hell be as free as the wind,” I said.

  “The same wind as raises kites? Look here,” Moth said, as she handed me the gown, “are you trying to let me know you want me to tell Rock you borrowed my gown and went out?”

  “May I change here?” I asked. “Tell him what you wish,” I said. I was blushing, and I decided to let things stand where they were; I knew Moth well enough to guess that she would read my coloring in her own shrewd way, no doubt accurately, and that she would say nothing to Rock.

  Harlot had given me an address in the northern part of the Enclave, and I knew that the alley she named was somewhere near the border line of the chinkty, or more fashionable, district. I found that the house was, at any rate, on the poorer side of the dividing line, and that it was a mere puzzle box, though roomier than mine, and that the meeting was to take place in the large main front room, for one of Harlot’s fellow Phoenixes, a mixie, was the wife of the tenant agent of the house.

  My gown, or Moth’s, of fake satin and garish green, was all wrong, as I sensed in a flash. It was a man-getting gown—for getting a certain low type of man, at that. I saw Harlot look at it with surprise. Four of the girls were in the plain work clothes of silk-reelers, not much better than what I had been wearing all day. There were ten girls, counting myself, and only three, as far as I could see, were mixies. They greeted each other, and me, with yellow-genteel courtesies, bowing, pumping up humility with joined fists.

  Harlot, my sponsor, tried to make the most of me. “I hear you have a fierce man—is that right, dear? Is he beautiful?”

  I was in the sky, and I talked too easily. “I’ll let him love me as long as he behaves. But the minute he starts kite-building while I’m off at work, or anything like that—out! I’ll kick his shuttlecock right over the wall.”

  Harlot in this circle was a stranger to me and a darling of strangers, and when the attention of the circle had moved away from me, as it did with alarming swiftness, I looked at her at the center of the group, and I was rather sad. I felt we would never enjoy that time we had promised each other, of raveling out to the end of the thread every scrap of our experiences. I began to feel self-conscious, tongue-tied, and pushed aside. What a flood of chatter and laughter that had nothing to do with me!

  A formal meeting began. It seemed that we were in a little imperial court, and every member of the hall was an official. A girl named Feather was “Empress Dowager”; Harlot was “First Crimson Button”—which meant that she handled the money. Some business, meaningless to me, was transacted with much argument as to formal procedure; one of the girls, named Brass Beauty, was “Custodian of Rites,” and she kept cursing and shouting like a harridan at breaches of protocol and punctilio by others. So bewildering was the etiquette of the meeting, so many were the squeals for attention, the shrieks for order, the catcalls of rebuke, that I was quite caught by surprise when Harlot, coming over to me, asked me for three coppers, my “tax”—I had, at some point, been accepted as a member!

  Then there was a great deal of talk about raising money for Old Arm. An appeal had gone out to all the halls of the Enclave for funds to support the job campaign. As the girls gabbled and squabbled—arguing not whether but how—I began to think about what Rock would want me to say, and what he would say himself, about all this. Was he against Old Arm simply because he had been the victim of the vicious and ruthless side of the race hero as a man? Did Rock really oppose the idea of organized resistance, which might lead to violence, against the yellows? What of his exuberant account of the battle against the Fukien rubbish? I was suddenly on the edge of tears, as I realized the depth of Rock’s feeling about Runner’s awkward country tactic, so courageous, so stubborn, so humane, and so effective; and as I realized, too, that I had somehow lost touch with Rock. I had no idea, any more, what he wanted, either of me or of life. “I’ll let him love me as long as…” Hayah! I ached suddenly to leave, to go home, and I felt smothered by the cackling of these light-headed girls.

  But the formal part of the meeting was over, and a brazier was glowing, and food came out from under damp cloths, and soon I ate the best meal I had had since…since slavery!

  Afterward we played house sparrow at two tables: I had to be instructed, and Brass Beauty swore at me for not moving the tiles in just the right m
anner.

  I walked home in a pleasant inward fog; much about the evening had seemed to me false, squalid-elegant, and imitative of the yellows, but I had had a happy time. The girls’ acceptance of me had seemed to be quick and complete, and what I saw as pretentiousness, now that I had left, had, at the time, made me feel rather high in social tone; the dream of a court of which we were the nobility had seemed, as it passed, intense and sweet.

  But when I entered our poor cupboard of a home the dream burst before my face.

  Rock was furious with me. Why had there been no hot meal waiting for his return this evening?

  Then his eyebrows shot up. What was I doing in that vixen gown?

  Then he reached out a hand, palm up. I fumbled for my purse, unslung it, and put it in his hand. He loosened its neck and poured out the contents. Nine coppers instead of twelve.

  “Ayah,” he said, “don’t tell me you’re one of those vixens who pay instead of being paid.”

  But in the end it was the want of supper that enveloped the whole of his anger. If I wanted to be his woman, he said, I’d better keep track of my duties.

  I did not make excuses; I did not mention the mad fantasy of a ruling court, the “Empress,” the numbered “Crimson Buttons,” the abusive guardian of formality; I certainly did not give a picture of myself, with a tile of the green dragon poised above the game board to add to my pattern and my score.

  The Madak Room

  Dutifully I fixed a hot meal the following evening, going to unusual expense and trouble to procure some tripe and to cook it in a savory oil with bamboo shoots and bits of water chestnut. But Rock did not come home to eat.

  Nor was he there the next night, nor the next, nor the fourth.

  On the sixth evening Old Boxer told me that during the afternoon he had seen Rock “with that lottery-chit boy with the bent back,” floating along Foochow Road—where the large opium taverns were clustered—looking, the tiger said, as if they both had a lamp on.

  My free day was to come three days later. I dared not miss a day at the filature for fear of losing my basin and never getting it back. I marked the time of those intervening days with sighs.

  On my off day, when at last it came, I waited until the timekeepers’ gongs had struck the half-morning watch and then I went to the bean-cruller shop and through it to Mink’s lottery basket behind. Mink was not in the chit boys’ corner. I edged to the desks and asked Weasel Number One whether the chit boy Mink, the one with the bent back, had been coming in regularly.

  The clerk merely shrugged; he was adding a mass of figures and closed his mind to me and to everything else beyond the desk.

  I waited through the noon drawing, and Mink did not come in.

  As the chit boys in the corner stirred to take out the chit books for the next drawing, I moved among them asking one after another if he knew what pipe tavern the man named Mink frequented.

  Suspicion and caution clothed these miserable peddlers, and most of them simply turned away without answering me, but at last one of them, touched perhaps by the urgency of my appeal, said, “Try the Golden Herons, on Foochow Road. Beyond those three big Cantonese teahouses with the carved fronts—do you know where I mean?”

  “I think so,” I said, having no idea, and sped away to the Settlement.

  When, after much wandering and inquiry, I found the Golden Herons, I thought the chit boy must have been playing a malicious joke on me, because the place obviously catered only to the most wealthy of yellows. Beyond a row of crimson columns and flanking a gate studded with bronze conch shells were two bas-reliefs in lacquered wood, in a style that was elevated yet commercial, betokening high prices within; picnic scenes of philosophers, noblemen, maid servants, deer, acacia, and gilded herons flying across broad reaches of lapis-lazuli sky.

  But I was on an urgent hunt, and timidly I pulled open the doors and edged around a carved spirit screen within.

  A yellow attendant in a figured-silk gown rushed at me raising his hands and pointing his long, curved fingernails at me as if to lacerate the eager question on my face, and he said in hysterical yet hushed tones, “Back door, you sow! Go around to the back where you belong. Out of here before you’re seen! Out, out, out!”

  This errand meant everything to me, and I did not intend to be rushed, and I asked, “How do I get around to the back?”

  The attendant was so taken aback by my equanimity that he began to explain, rather politely at first but then with a growing anger at having been taken off balance, how to thread my way through a complication of side alleys to the pigs’ gate….

  And just then one of his distinguished yellow customers pushed open from within one of the several side doors off the central hall where I stood, and the customer, in an ecstasy of waxen animation, turned to chat a moment with someone inside, and as he held the door I saw a magnificent room. It contained several groups of padded divans clustered about brass lamps set on pretty tripods, and on the divans I saw richly dressed yellow men reclining, some busy cooking pellets at the lamps, others smoking and chatting with neighbors with an appearance of casualness and cheerful friendliness. Beyond, at tables, sat other rich yellow men playing games or toying with delicious snacks for which they had no appetite.

  The customer, with eyes sleepy but for the fierce and bottomless little apertures, like ant holes, of the pupils, dreamily came out into the hall, letting the door close behind him. On light feet, as if lazy-skating along on a cushion of scented air, he came up to me, and he said, “Delightful! Delightful!” He rubbed the backs of his knuckles on my cheek. The attendant was frozen in a noncommittal attitude. With all my anxiety, I nevertheless enjoyed this moment: the officious yellow underling not only interrupted in his contempt for me but, as it were, countermanded from it by a man of superior taste. The customer floated around the spirit screen and out. The attendant flew at me now, closing his claws on my upper arms and rushing me backwards toward the door. I flung up my arms with all my strength and threw off his stinging grips, and I turned and ran out at the door.

  I made my way through a maze of dirty alleys to the back, or pigs’, gate of the Golden Herons; the only decoration on this entrance was an outline drawing of an opium pipe. The spirit screen was of double-thick brick, for the evil ghosts of hogs and sows, addicted perhaps even in the grave, would most crucially have to be kept off the premises.

  Here at the back there was no silk-clad attendant but instead two armed yellow policemen.

  “Work or smoke?” one of them curtly asked me.

  “I’m looking for my man,” I said.

  “Make no noise or fuss,” the policeman said, and turned back to conversation with his companion.

  “Where are the smoking rooms?” I asked.

  A thumb pointed over a uniformed shoulder, and I pushed open a wooden door.

  My first impression was of a sickening, sour odor—of humanity rather than of the habit. Ayah, the number-two facilities were less elegant, by farther than far, than those I had glimpsed off the front hall. Here there were no divans; the smokers lay on mats on the floor, crowded side by side. Men outnumbered women, ten to one. Tattered whites I Some reclined on their sides, holding up their heads with forearms propped on elbows, heating over the lamps’ flames little balls of dross—lumps of prepared opium that had already been smoked once by the yellows in the number-one rooms out front—impaled on metal stylets with bamboo handles; others had pushed the heated dross balls into their heavy pipe heads and were drawing smoke into their lungs, holding it there, and slowly and reluctantly blowing it out, then talking with animation with their neighbors, or lying back, eyes open, on the headrests provided here for the clientele: bricks wrapped in rags. The faces, as I looked about for those of Rock and Mink, did not seem to me to be pathetic or wasted or sick: to the contrary, there was an atmosphere, here, which rather frightened me, of something like true freedom, and t
hese bodies between which I gingerly stepped belonged to whites remarkable for seeming to be pleased with absolutely everything. Could I begrudge Rock such a deep and still sense of well-being as these forms seemed to be enjoying? Could there be anything wrong with his having such pleasure except that it was a pleasure that had nothing to do with me?

  I had scarce begun to ask myself these questions when I concluded that Rock and Mink were not in the room.

  There were nearly two hundred whites on the dirty floor of this room—as compared with perhaps thirty yellows on their divans in the number-one accommodation that I had glimpsed earlier—and I decided to go round once more, to make sure that I had not missed Rock and Mink.

  This time I heard snatches of the smokers’ talk, which was commonplace, lucid, and euphoric, and I was surprised to hear how many of these men and women, prostrate with their habit, were speaking of Old Arm and of his coming campaign. Then I realized the absurdity of my surprise: What better forum than this for hope?

  I had not missed them. They were not there.

  I had some coppers with me. I felt a surge of temptation: if I could lose every worry, every pain! Be non-white for a few dreamy hours! One pipe would not make a habit.

  My eyes swept once more around the room, and, pulled away from the temptation by a thought of Rock, I inwardly murmured envious congratulations to these happy few whites and then went out in the hall and asked the policemen if there were any other number-two smoke rooms.

  There were not.

  The policeman had spoken of work. Where was the work done?

  The thumb again.

  Now, little knowing where I was going, I entered the regions of the damned: a series of small rooms where bands of whites, obviously all on the pipe, worked at various stages of preparation of the drug for smoking, in order to earn the coppers they needed to smoke themselves. In each room a single process was carried out by perhaps a dozen whites, working under the ever-sharp eyes of four yellows, including a policeman, to make sure that none of the opium would be stolen. They worked, further, with their forearms protruded, and firmly strapped, through small holes in a wire mesh that stood guard between themselves and the precious dream stuff.